Belief in a Just World and Jury Decisions in a Civil Rape Trial

When people's belief in a just world (BJW) is challenged, it can be restored by attributing blame to the victim or alleviating the victim's suffering. In criminal cases, jurors can attribute responsibility to victims, but cannot alleviate suffering. Participants ( n = 106) heard a taped civil rape case. The effect of age of plaintiff, gender of participant, and type of participant on mock jurors' reactions to a plaintiff were examined. Participants evaluated responsibility of plaintiff and awarded monetary damages. It was hypothesized that, given this opportunity to compensate the victim, jurors would be less likely to derogate the victim. As hypothesized, women with high and low BJW attributed the same level of responsibility to the plaintiff but those with a high BJW awarded more monetaly damages. Men with high BJW awarded much less in damages than did men with low BJW. The just-world theory appears to explain many of the decisions made by mock jurors.     

泰文和中文阅读过程中的眼动控制(中文)

This paper analyses some aspects of the eye movement behaviour of readers of Thai and Chinese. The main focus is on readers′landing site distributions on words and how these are affected by the lack of clear word boundary information due to the absence of inter-word spaces. Empirical evidence from Thai and Chinese readers suggest that readers can relatively accurately target word centres. We make the case that this accuracy can be accounted for by a default targetting model(effectively, the prior landing site distribution, in Bayesian terms)modulated by statistical cues about word beginnings available from word-initial character frequencies.     

The role of global top-down factors in local eye-movement control in reading

Although the development of the field of reading has been impressive, there are a number of issues that still require much more attention. One of these concerns the variability of skilled reading within the individual. This paper explores the topic in three ways: (1) it quantifies the extent to which, two factors, the specific reading task (comprehension vs. word verification) and the format of reading material (sentence vs. passage) influence the temporal aspects of reading as expressed in word-viewing durations; (2) it examines whether they also affect visuomotor aspects of eye-movement control; and (3) determine whether they can modulate local lexical processing. The results reveal reading as a dynamic, interactive process involving semi-autonomous modules, with top-down influences clearly evident in the eye-movement record.     

Continuing problems in exploring the structure of job satisfaction

Job satisfaction ratings-defined as the product (importance) X (what the job should offer, what the job actually offers)-on 29 job dimensions were factor analyzed for two large and randomly drawn samples of management-level males. An identical analysis was also carried out on the perceived discrepancy score alone. Differences between the results of the analyses on the two types of measures indicated that while the importance weighted measure of job satisfaction is more elegant and conceptually appealing, it is embedded in considerable measurement difficulty. Some probable sources of and possible approaches to handling this difficulty were offered.     

Florida after the furman decision: The effect of extralegal factors on the processing of capital offense cases

This study investigated the existence of discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty in Florida after the Furman decision of 1972. The purpose of the study was to examine the differential effect of the race and sex of the defendant and the victim on the trial outcome, conviction offense and imposition of the death penalty. Differential treatment was apparent in each of the legal events examined. The results indicate that Florida's post-Furman statute has been unsuccessful in eliminating differential treatment of offenders from the imposition of the death penalty.     

The consequences for memory of imagining in another person’s voice

Subjects listened to and imagined words and then attempted to discriminate words they had heard from words they had imagined. Discrimination was better when subjects imagined themselves saying the words (Experiments 1 and 2) than when subjects imagined the words in the speaker’s voice. Subjects also had more difficulty discriminating imagined from perceived words when they imagined in the speaker’s voice than when they imagined words in a voice other than their own or the speaker’s (Experiment 1). The results are consistent with the idea that reality monitoring is affected by the degree of similarity in sensory characteristics of memories derived from perception and from imagination (Johnson & Raye, 1981).     

The Depression Anxiety and Stress Scales: Reference data from a large psychiatric outpatient sample

The published norms for the Depression Anxiety and Stress Scale (DASS) give results for clinical populations that largely fall in the severe to very severe categories. As a result, within this population, the ability to compare the comparative contributions of the underlying emotional components is reduced. The present study presents results from a large general psychiatric outpatient population and provides percentile norms with confidence intervals for both the original DASS and the shorter 21‐item form. It is noted that both forms have high validity but that the correlations between scales are higher than those reported in non‐clinical populations. There was little variation between sexes but some variation of results with age with both younger and older cohorts having lower scores except for the Stress scale where there were higher scores in the older group. There is some evidence of a ceiling effect in the Depression and Stress scales. It was noted that nearly a quarter of patient scores fell within the originally defined normal range suggesting that the DASS would not be a particularly sensitive instrument in its previously reported use as a screening instrument for psychiatric illness.